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BROCHART, Pinx.

HANNAH.

JEHENNE, Lith.

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HANNAH THE PRAYING MOTHER.

HE story of Hannah is a purely domestic one, and is most valuable in unveiling the intimate and trustful life of faith that existed between the Jehovah revealed in the Old Testament and each separate soul, however retired and humble. It is not God the Lawgiver and King, but, if we may so speak, God in his private and confidential relations to the individual. The story opens briefly, after the fashion of the Bible, whose brevity in words is such a contrast to the tediousness of most professed sacred books.

"There was a man," says the record, "named Elkanah, and he had two wives; and the name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah, and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none." Hannah, from the story, appears to have had one of those intense natures, all nerve and sensibility, on which every trouble lies with double weight. The lack of children in an age when motherhood was considered the essential glory of woman, was to her the climax of anguish and mortification. Nor was there wanting the added burden of an unfriendly party to notice and to inflame the hidden wound by stinging commentaries; for we are told that "her adversary provoked her sore, to make her fret." And thus, year by year, as the family went up to the sacred feast at Shiloh, and other exultant mothers displayed their fair sons and daughters, the sacred feast was turned into gall for the unblest one, and we are told that Hannah "wept and did not eat." "Then said Elkanah unto her, Hannah, why weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? Am I not better to thee than ten sons?"

Hannah was one of a class of women in whom genius and a poetic nature are struggling with a vague intensity, giving

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